I’m CEO of Digital Power Group, a tech and investment advisory, a Senior Fellow with the Manhattan Institute, a Faculty Fellow at the school of Engineering & Applied Science at Northwestern University, on the boards of the Marshall Institute, a think tank focused on space and missile defense, and Notre Dame's Reilly Center for Science, Technology & Ethics. I co-authored the energy-tech book "The Bottomless Well," was the tech strategist for a boutique venture fund, a tech advisor for Banc of America Securities, and co-authored a tech investment newsletter. I served in the White House Science Office under President Reagan, and studied physics at Queen’s University, Canada, and Rutgers. I may hold positions in or advise companies mentioned.

Has Apple Peaked? Hardly.

In 1980, no one – no one – anticipated what Apple would become. That era was dominated by Central Computing. No one foresaw the revolution Distributed Computing would unleash. Hundreds of new companies emerged, many old ones evaporated, and millions of new jobs were created in an employment tsunami that transformed American businesses for the next two decades.

I wrote about this massive transformation recently in the San Diego paper – and why we are now on the cusp of a similar tech revolution. But the trillion dollar question circulating in the investor community is whether Apple’s value [NASDAQ:AAPL] has peaked, like those companies it ended up pushing aside back when Ronald Reagan was in the White House?

To see where Apple is trending, don’t look at SEC filings or slick media events. Look to the emerging technologies epitomized by three tiny companies: Narrative Science, Audience [NASDAQ:ADNC], and Touché (the latter not even a company yet). These software innovators illuminate the future of computing, and Apple – and whatever we’ll end up calling the emerging post-Internet Cloud-centric era.

Noting that scale alone is no guarantee of survival (just ask investors in PanAm, Sears and many others) fellow Forbes contributor Eric Jackson forecasts a short life for two current tech giants, Google [NASDAQ:GOOG] and Facebook. But on Apple’s future he punted, and I respectfully point out he made the mistake of labeling Apple “a hardware company.” I believe Apple’s success and future are anchored in software.

Of course Apple uses and makes hardware too, consummate hardware. But software is what differentiated Apple from the get-go, software built on a silicon computing revolution developed by others. Can Apple, can anyone, bring as much progress to the user-interface as Apple’s three original core software innovations? To answer that, consider what Apple did at its outset to make computing friendly, setting a standard subsequently emulated by competitors.

The magic of the 1984 Mac and its progeny resides first in its underlying software operating system (OS) – the reason early Macs didn’t freeze or even get infected. The OS was fast, stable, and consumer-friendly. Everything else at that time was clunky, complex or confusing.

The second software brilliance was in the graphical-user-interface (GUI) – what the screen looked like. If you don’t remember, Google-Image a picture of a typical computer screen from 1979. Greek. The Apple GUI was huge, revolutionary. Of course it was copied.

The third innovation was another man-machine interface – the mouse. Yes, it was a piece of hardware, but the innovation wasn’t the little beige box with a roller wheel. It was the software that interpreted what you did as you scrolled around. This feature beat the socks off typing in long strings of arcane keyboard instructions.

All together, that trifecta of software tamed the underlying powerful logic engines. In simplistic terms, that user-friendly software did the same for logic engines what automatic transmissions, power steering and power brakes did to tame the internal combustion engine and launch the age of the automobile.

There were other computing incumbents circa 1980. Apple didn’t invent the microprocessor, the floppy drive, or the low-cost cathode-ray-tube screen that were the PC’s physical platform. Apple’s physical design – packaging — was distinctive and compelling both then and now. But if the first Mac in that unique box had the operating system and interfaces of, say, those early PCs, or DEC’s engineering-centric minicomputers, Apple would never have become Apple.

Apple continues to ride the wave of advances in hardware; microprocessors, radio chips, display screens, batteries, etc. And they continue to design elegant, sometimes downright beautiful packaging. But what do they have up their sleeve to make computing ever easier, simpler, more intuitive and natural?

Since Apple is highly secretive about what’s going on in their Skunk Works, we can only deduce the future from one recently deployed software feature and two more about which I’ll speculate. All radically advance the human-machine interface that can change computing as much in the next couple of decades as those following 1984.

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